This disclosure relates generally to the field of microfluidic technologies. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, it relates to the use of dual active matrix circuitry to individually actuate and heat liquid droplets on a biochip.
In recent years, biochip devices have attracted huge interests in scientific research applications because they are capable of carrying out highly repetitive laboratory tasks with a small fluid volume, thus saving time and materials. Traditional biochip devices use micro and nanofluidic channels to manipulate fluids of interest based on the principles of continuous fluid flow. The complexity in integrating large numbers of micropumps, microvalves, and microchannels into a channel based biochip, however, limits the scope of the analytical problems these devices can address.
Furthermore, most biochip devices reported in literature today still require application specific design and fabrication, which is a laborious and time consuming process. Because current biochip development is based on a one-application-one-implementation model, communication is required between biochip end users and device engineers for each analytical or synthetic task to be addressed.
For microfluidic biochip devices to become viable took for biologists, chemists, clinicians, field officers, and public health officials, they must be constructed in a manner that allows users to focus on the specific tasks they are interested in without worrying about the design principles of the biochip. Though efforts have been devoted to developing standardized computer-aided design protocols to facilitate communication and simplify biochip development, custom fabrication of a biochip is still required for each specific task to be addressed. Accordingly, a significant amount of effort, time, and cost are associated with the development and manufacture of an effective biochip. These disadvantages prevent the full realization of the benefits of biochips and have resulted in most biochips being utilized in research labs with limited real world application.
It would be desirable to provide a biochip device that overcomes the complexity and corresponding limitations of a channel based biochip device. It would further be desirable to provide a biochip device that is both easily customizable by an end user to perform a specific set of tasks sought to be performed by the user and reusable to perform a different set of tasks. It would further be desirable to provide a biochip device capable of achieving precise control of process conditions for the specific tasks to be performed.